Frtedsnews

An occasional comment from a priest in the Church of England committed to the process of Christian unity and drawing on a fifty year experience of counselling and pastoral care.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Teenagers in love

In the forty years or so of counselling, psychotherapy, pastoral care and teaching all of threm to p-g level, one theme was very noticeable:

adult affairs of a sexual nature were often (almost usually!) between two people who were acting out some unresolved piece of the teenage year - going back to a teenage sweetheart, "discovering" a change of sexual orientation, joining a LGBT unit of some sort. All this was grist to the ill of the work with the client. However in today's world life is different.

We are informed that sexual orientation is genetic, inborn, and immutable; that we have no choice. The evidence for this is incomplete, to say the least! However it has produced a strange world in which sexual orientation is seen as a matter in which we have no choice It has also, to my mind, made homo-erotic behaviour fashionable and politically correct.

The danger is of our confusing genetic material with an orientation which has become fixated at an early stage of life. In the teenage years - as I experienced them myself and observed the behaviour of the adolescents with whom I worked in the parishes and cadet forces and among family and friends - the struggle of competing hormones and the apparent expectations of the world around gives rise to house and inflamed desires which seem overwhelming at times.

Where the majority of those around are of the same sex, these desires are very likely to find an outlet, naturally, with those available - i.e are lesbian or gay, "crushes" on a teacher or older, admirable fellow-pupil and so forth, not to mention groping ion the showers and explorations "behind the bike sheds" as was the wont in former days.

When members of the opposite sex become available, further opportunities arise and for the majority the sexual orientation moves into the heterosexual one necessary for the continuation of the species.

All this can seem benign, until.we take into account the homophobic bullying which takes place so appallingly on the playgrround and in schools, seemingly uncheckable.

Now we find an equally damaging feature coming into play after a gradual increase in LGBT pressure and publicity, that of what I would term "homophiliac" bullying, some of very distasteful in that I would suggest that this can take the form of pederasty and paedophilia.

So what do we make of LGBT provision for teenagers? It should be welcome as giving information. However it must be proper information not the merely fashionable, which suggests we must make the
step into our "true" orientation.

Not so! To me the evidence is that this is not good and will lead to more of the probelms faced by the confused in their thirties and forties as they try to come to terms with an affair or a sudden change in their orientation.

The evidence to my mind as to whether all sexual orientation is genetic has to be measured against the prevailing fashion Otherwise we make a quite fatal (in that it may led to suicide) error of confusing our genetic makeup with positions taken up or induced to the extent of them becoming fixated emotional standpoints - best exemplified by the paedophile.